By Admin
Three months since ‘The Path’ was launched on Amazon, we have several inputs from readers. The key feedback was about the inferences drawn by readers from the book. Here are the top 3 findings:
1. To build a leadership position, an organization must crack a big enough problem and continue to maintain the big competitive difference on an ongoing basis.
Often such big problem would not just be organizational but also of the industry your organization belongs to. And most of the competitors and even clients would have given up, thinking that the problem is a characteristics of the industry and it is not worth solving.
Our organization in ‘The Path’, Terra Pharma identifies chronic non reliability of supplies (‘Non availability’ of medicines) as a big problem of the industry. It was hurting customers, and industry players were complacent with the vulnerability of customers. Terra Pharma not only dramatically improves availability of medicines but also created a competitive edge that leaves competitors gaping.
2. An organization must find its own path of excellence.
In fact, every organization has in it enough capability to find its own pole position and create long term difference. This difference is created by the way an organization organizes its structure, infrastructure, processes and capabilities.
Terra Pharma show cases this aspect. As it chases to solve the big problem, its people commit to figuring out the solution themselves, one step at a time. They strive to improve their situation on an ongoing basis. Every time they get stuck and their capabilities are challenged, they figure out their own way to deal with the obstacles and constraints. In the process they build their own path of excellence and a world beating competitiveness.
3. Improve the Process of Improvement.
It is a (blind) trend to allocate xx number of hours every year year for training each and every employee and then keep searching what are the new techniques to improve their performance. Organizations tend to keep forcing their employees to each and every new technique that appears in the market. And since each technique has its own direction, organizations tend to be running several improvement programs with each program taking the organization in different directions. As a result, although several things improve in the organization, the organization by itself does not move much in the right direction. It is therefore important to first improve the process of improvement.
As Terra Pharma showed, a process of improvement that is focused on just a few things of high leverage takes the complete organization faster on its path of excellence. They do not jump into learning too many new techniques, rather they move on their path of improvement and allow the path to tell what particular technique they need to learn. Indeed, when they follow this process, each technique they learn delivers significant results to the organization as a whole.
The summary of above three points are also available as power point slides at slide share. Here is the link:
3 steps to Leveraging Operations
As you read The Path, please continue to write about your findings to lolla@localhost:8888/wordpress